The charge runs like this: people used the Bible to defend slavery, to rank one race above another and to keep women beneath men, so the Bible must be where those evils come from. Dr. Charlie Dates, senior pastor of the historic Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, answers that the argument rests on a hidden premise that does not hold. It assumes that whatever people did with the book is what the book teaches. Separate those two things and the charge has to prove something much harder. His verdict is blunt: “the Bible’s not the problem. We’ve been the problem.”
What is the accusation at full strength?
Dates does not soften the complaint. He describes a suspicion that the Bible, rather than being the word of God that helps us handle our problems, is itself their source. Some point to racism, asking why God makes one nation of Abraham, why Scripture distinguishes Jews from Gentiles, and why some people seem to stand outside the family of God from the start. Some readers have built an ethnocentrism on those questions, placing one people at the center and pushing everyone else to the margins. Others point to what Dates calls toxic patriarchy, or to money, misogyny and slavery.
The weak version of the charge says that some Christians behaved badly. Nobody disputes that. The strong version says the text supplied the reasons. Slaveholders did not invent their verses. Paul really did write, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh” (Ephesians 6:5). If the justification came from the page, the page is implicated.
As an argument, it has three steps. The Bible was used to justify slavery, racism and the domination of women. What a text is used to justify shows what it teaches. So the Bible teaches those things. The first step is history and the third is the conclusion. Everything rides on the second.
Does the way a book is used reveal what it means?
Test the second premise against a case. Dates supplies one: the theology of enslaved Africans in their own words, preserved in spirituals like Did My Lord Deliver Daniel, There’s a Balm in Gilead and Deep River, which his church preached through during Black History Month. “These enslaved persons do not deny the person and work of Jesus Christ or his word,” he observes, even though that same word was used to abuse them. When emancipation came, they had every reasonable chance to throw the faith off like a coat, and they did not. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and many others anchored their arguments for abolition in the God of the Bible.
If use reveals meaning, then the Bible teaches slavery, because enslavers used it that way, and it also teaches abolition, because the enslaved and the abolitionists used it that way. A book cannot teach both. Use alone cannot settle meaning. Some readings are faithful and some are not, and we need a way to tell which is which.
Dates grounds this in ordinary experience: “You don’t like for people to quote you in a way that you didn’t intend for it to be meant.” Everyone already grants a speaker that protection. The charge against the Bible quietly denies it to the Bible. Once that protection is restored, pointing to the abuse is no longer enough. The accuser has to show that the abusive reading is the correct reading of the text, and the testimony of the enslaved readers makes that very hard to do.
Which Christianity is on trial?
Dates borrows his central distinction from Frederick Douglass: the problem was never Christianity proper, the Christianity of Christ, but the Christianity of this land. He names the mechanism as “how this land has abdicated the authority of God,” moved God out of the way, made itself the authority and imposed that authority on the Scriptures.
The distinction invites an obvious counterexample. A defender of slavery could say the same thing in reverse. He could insist that his reading was the Christianity of Christ and that the abolitionists were the ones bending the text. If both sides can claim the label, the label settles nothing. The distinction only does work if there is some way to check which side has actually set the text’s authority aside.
Dates offers a test he applies to every modern application of Scripture. The principle preached today has to resonate with the world and subject matter in which the text was first spoken. When people take truth and bend it into a social or cultural movement, he warns, “they squeeze it to fit their own agenda.” That gives two diagnostic questions. Does the reading fit what the passage meant to its first hearers? And does the reading happen to serve the reader’s own money, status or power? A reading that fails the first and passes the second is the clearest sign of what Douglass meant by the Christianity of this land.
Dates’s counterfactual applies the second question. If the American church had not given itself to the love of money and to ethnic superiority, and had listened to history and to Christians around the world, he argues that “chattel slavery would’ve never happened and it especially would not have happened with the permission of the church.” Nobody can rerun history to prove that. The claim has evidence behind it, though. The readers who had nothing to gain from slavery, enslaved believers above all, did not find it in the text. When a conclusion appears mostly among the people it profits, the profit is a better explanation of the conclusion than the page is.
Dates also refuses to let anyone hide behind the distinction. Those who trace their Christian heritage to the colonial revivals, he says, have to reckon with where their theological heroes got it wrong and with how those wrongs spilled into injustices that continue today.
What about the verse the enslavers actually quoted?
This is the strongest form of the objection. The law of Moses contains rules about debt, land sales and servitude. Paul tells servants to obey masters. Even if enslavers stretched these passages, the passages exist.
Dates’s answer starts with what the Bible is aiming to do. “The Bible is aiming to bring order to the chaos that sin created.” It does not try to solve every problem one at a time. It diagnoses the core problem from which the others grow. “Sin did a job on us,” he says, and sin also broke families, governments, the handling of money and the way people treat ethnic difference. On this reading the law codes were never meant to restore the garden. They managed the fallout of a broken world. Some parts are prescriptive, he grants, “But there are significant portions as well that are descriptive that tell us this is the way it worked in that ancient culture.” If a reader concludes that God wanted people in debt, families broken or women sexually exploited, “then you are reading the scripture wrong. That’s not the intent.”
Apply that to Ephesians 6:5. Paul is writing to servants already living inside a Greco-Roman household system. He tells them how to live faithfully within a situation they did not choose and could not change. In the same passage he turns to masters, tells them to stop threatening their servants, and reminds them that they answer to a Master in heaven who shows no partiality (Ephesians 6:9). The enslavers took a word addressed to the vulnerable, cut it loose from the word addressed to the powerful, and made it a timeless rule for creating and enforcing bondage. Dates says exactly this: anyone who made “slaves obey your masters” a principle for keeping enslaved people obedient misread the passage, because that was not what it meant or intended. Instructing people inside an existing arrangement is different from authorizing it, and a regulation that limits damage does not declare the damage good.
That reading answers how the verse was abused. It does not answer every question a reader may bring. Dates does not take up why Paul gave no direct call to end slavery, and that question has to be worked through passage by passage. His principle closes the shortcut the accusation depends on, the move from “the text addresses this” to “the text approves this.” The remaining work is exegesis, done honestly.
Is authority itself the real problem?
Some readers will grant all this and object at a deeper level. The trouble is not a misread verse. It is that the Bible claims authority at all, and authority is what chained people.
Dates locates the problem elsewhere. On patriarchy, he says we are wrestling with “the plight of poor authority, not the fact that there is some authority, but poor authority.” A stop sign illustrates the difference. If one driver reads it as a suggestion to slow down and another decides no one should tell anyone when to stop, accidents multiply and people get hurt. “It’s gotta mean stop to everybody.” His Illinois driver’s license makes the same point: it grants the freedom to drive without granting the freedom to ignore the rules. “Just because you have freedom, you do not have permission to go rogue on the road.”
Bad authority harming people does not show that all authority harms people. It shows that the quality of an authority matters. The live question is whether the authority the Bible claims is good, and that brings the argument back to what the text says rather than what people did with it.
On women, the text gives a clear answer. Dates says “the Bible does not in any way suggest that men are better than women or that men are superior to women, or that women are inferior to men in any way.” Genesis states the starting point: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). Dates adds that “anybody who tells you that God made man superior to woman is not reading the scripture correctly.” He points to Ephesians 5, where Paul writes, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21), and says plainly that his wife is a better leader than he is in some areas. Faithful Christians still differ on how this applies to particular roles in church and home. Dates’s claim is narrower and firmer: superiority of worth is not in the text, so a system built on it distorts the text.
What the argument proves, and what it leaves open
Dates’s case establishes something real but limited. The history of abuse does not, by itself, convict the Bible. The inference from “it was used for evil” to “it teaches evil” fails, because the same book was used for opposite ends, and because the abusive readings collapse when tested against what the passages meant and against the interests of the people reading them.
It does not prove, by that alone, that the Bible is the word of God. Other evidence has to carry that weight. Dates is also candid that his account depends on a premise some readers reject. After saying that sin did a job on us, he admits that if you do not believe this, you will not be able to fully accept the rest of what he says. His whole account of what the Bible is aiming at assumes that the deepest human problem lies in us and not only in our circumstances.
Nor does it end disagreement among sincere readers. Dates says he lands at different points of emphasis than other preachers and does not claim to have it perfectly right. “However, when truth is in the hands of an interpreter, truth can take on the color of that interpreter.” He aims that warning in every direction, saying people with conservative convictions and people with progressive convictions alike are making the Bible say what they want. His remedy is accountability: checking our biases with other believers who submit to Scripture, so that over time we can see where we are wrong.
The final consequence is the one most readers miss. If the problem is us, setting the Bible down does not remove the problem. The interpreter who bent Scripture toward domination would still exist without Scripture and would find other authorities to bend. Rejecting the book because it was misused leaves the misuser untouched. Dates asks for something harder: to treat the book as the authority and ourselves as the ones under examination, open to the possibility “that we are often wrong.”